"Love in a Global Marketplace"

When I was 17, I worked after school at an
Esprit clothing store in Montreal. It was a pleasant job, mostly involving folding cotton
garments into little squares so sharp their corners could have taken your eye out. But for
some reason, corporate headquarters didn't consider our T-shirt origami to be sufficiently
profitable. One day, our calm world was turned upside down by a regional supervisor who
swooped in to indoctrinate us in the culture of the Esprit brand - and increase our
productivity in the process.

"Esprit," she told us, "is like a
good friend." I was sceptical, and I let it be known. Sceptical, I quickly learned,
is not considered an asset in the low-wage service sector. Two weeks later, the supervisor
fired me for being in possession of that most loathed workplace character trait: "bad
attitude".

I guess that was one of my first lessons in why
large multinational corporations are not "like a good friend", since good
friends, while they may do many horrible and hurtful things, rarely fire you.

So I was interested when, earlier this month,
advertising agency TBWA Chiat-Day rolled out the new "brand identity" for the
North American retail giant Shoppers Drugmart. (Rebranding launches are, in corporate
terms, like being born again). It turns out that the chain is no longer "everything
you want in a drugstore", ie a place where you can buy things you need - but is now a
"caring friend". This is a caring friend which takes earthly form in a chain of
800 drugstores, with a $22m ad budget burning a hole in its pocket.

Shoppers' new slogan is "take care of
yourself", selected, according to campaign creator Pat Pirisi because it
"echo[es] what a caring friend would say". Get ready for it to be said thousands
of times a day by young cashiers as they hand you plastic bags filled with razors, dental
floss and diet pills. "We believe this is a position Shoppers can own," Mr
Pirisi explains.

Leaving aside the somewhat unsettling idea of
"owning" friendship, asking clerks to adopt this particular phrase as their
mantra seems a bit heartless in this age of casual, insecure, underpaid McLabour. Service
sector workers are so often told to take care of themselves - since no one, least of all
their mega-employers, is going to take care of them. Yet it's one of the ironies of our
branded age that, as corporations become more remote by cutting lasting ties with us as
their employees, they are increasingly sidling up to us as consumers, whispering sweet
nothings about friendship and community.

It's not just Shoppers: Wal-Mart ads tell stories
about clerks who, in a pinch, lend customers their own personal wedding gowns and Saturn's
ads are populated by car dealers who offer counselling when customers lose their jobs. You
see, according to the new marketing book, Values Added, modern marketers have to
"make your brand a cause and your cause a brand".

Maybe I still have a bad attitude, but this
collective corporate hug feels about as empty today as it did when I was an
about-to-be-unemployed sweater folder. Particularly when you stop to consider the cause of
all this mass-produced warmth.

Explaining Shoppers' new brand identity to
Canada's Financial Post, Mr Pirisi said that, "in an age when people are becoming
more and more distrustful of corporations - the World Trade Organisation protests will
attest to that - and at a time when the health care system isn't what it used to be, we
realised we had to send consumers a message about partnership."

Ever since large corporations like Nike, Shell
and Monsanto began facing increased scrutiny from civil society - mostly for putting
short-term profits far ahead of environmental responsibility and job security - an
industry has ballooned to help these companies respond. It seems clear, however, that many
in the corporate world remain convinced that all they have is a "messaging
problem," one that can be neatly solved by settling on the right, socially minded
brand identity.

It turns out that that's the last thing they
need. British Petroleum found this out the hard way when it was forced to distance itself
from its own outrageous rebranding campaign, Beyond Petroleum. The oil company's own
European consumers told BP that it had better change its business practices before its
brand identity.

As evidence of the state of corporate confusion,
I am frequently asked to give presentations to individual corporations. Fearing that my
words will end up in some gooey ad campaign, I always refuse. But this advice I can offer
without reservation: nothing will change until corporations realise that they don't have a
communications problem. They have a reality problem.